Top 5 Tips to Build Trust With Customers

Building trust with customers is important, even if you never meet them. Read on to learn the top 7 tips to build trust with customers.

Are you worried about your customer retention rates? Are you wondering how to build trust with an online customer base? Even though you'll never meet your customers, learning how to build trust is key to your long-term success.

There are more than 5.5 million small businesses in the United Kingdom, and they frequently have to compete with much larger companies. The big dogs have more resources, more logistical support, and more money to solve their problems. How can you be expected to compete?

If you're asking yourself these types of questions, this article is for you. We'll walk you through seven ways to build trust with remote customers and help you get started with some simple solutions.

1. Optimize Your Website

Is your website geared toward your customer? It's a great question to ask as a small business owner. You may have optimized your website to include key phrases that your clients are searching for, but you can take a few steps to improve your website even further.

First, make sure that customers don't have to search for your business contact information. Give them a few options including phone, email, and live chat. Live chat is a great way to influence your customers in real time. They don't have to wait for an answer and they have a positive customer service experience.

If you're running multiple social media accounts, you should be working to minimize response time. Customers expect responses in hours or minutes, not days. Always have someone tasked with responding to your customers.

2. Ask for Positive Reviews

If you're looking to build trust, it's always a good idea to reference positive customer reviews. You don't have to ask for them: there are reliable third-party websites that are dedicated to reviewing businesses. If you get a good review, you can link to it on your website.

On the other hand, you can build trust by addressing negative reviews. Do you need to improve your delivery rates? Are customers abandoning sales because of slow-loading web pages? Take the time to read all of your reviews and respond to them in a calm, professional manner.

When you post customer reviews on your website, it's good to include a picture and a name. Make a separate page for reviews and testimonials and try to get an in-depth response from at least three customers. Customer reviews make building trust easier for new companies.

Once you start getting reviews from your customers, you can use a review funnel system such as Rocket Reviews which will stream reviews to your website or share on social media, or have them automatically streamed/shared according to your criteria. It also automates a system for dealing with unhappy reviewers!

3. Enlist Micro-Influencers

Business owners should always be striving to make their brand more visible online. One way to get your name out there is to enlist the support of “micro-influencers.” That's just an easy way to say that you should try to get some positive reviews from experts in your field.

If there's a particular website that you follow, ask them if you can write a guest post. It'll give you visibility and work to build trust with your customers. A guest blog doesn't have to be longer than about 1,000 words. Just make sure that you include a link to your website.

If possible, get an expert to make a video testimonial for your website. You might have to wait until they have some free time, but even a one-minute video can boost your sales. Reach out via email or social media channels for a quicker response.

4. Nurture Customer Relationships

You can't buy customer relationships, but you can nurture them over time. If you have a product or service that needs to be done annually, send a reminder four months in advance and then one month in advance. If you build your client list via email, you don't have to spend the money on printed advertising material.

If you are on social media, try to connect with your customers and get a sense of what they need from your business. You can run polls, offer coupons, and ask customers for their opinion on your services. Building trust means that you want to hear from them, even when they're in between sales.

Focus groups are a great way to get customer feedback. Take the time and determine who your users are: you might find that they come from a different demographic than you originally thought. You should continually be refining your marketing efforts.

5. Get Involved Locally

A great way to build trust with local customers is to sponsor local sports teams. Contact your local television news channel and ask them to do a story on your business. News shows love to focus on local, successful businesses.

If you can, put your business name on a billboard or other public sign. You need to build awareness of your brand and get your name out to the general public. It's important to have an easily-recognizable logo and to have it seen as much as possible.

Another way to generate local interest is to buy ad space on trains, buses, or subways. You might never know the exact value of passive advertising, but again, brand recognition is key.

If you're just starting out, take the time to develop a colourful but simple logo. You can do some A/B testing with focus groups to see which design works best, and then roll out some local ad campaigns.

How to Build Trust with Customer Management Systems

Overall, you're going to build trust with your customers by delivering on time and being responsive to their concerns. You might want to begin by focusing on customer retention and engaging your customer base. But how do you get started?

We offer small businesses the chance to build an effective customer management system. That means that we can help you build email lists, generate marketing campaigns, and seal up the holes in your sales funnel.

The good news for small business owners is that you don't have to do everything yourself. If you're used to making all of your phone calls, doing all of your blog writing, and managing all of your deliveries, it's probably time to take a little break.

We'll help you automate your marketing efforts and increase your productivity. Drop us a line and let us know what your business needs to succeed!